engleski

First language attrition in early successive bilingualism

The subject of the research is a boy whose bilingual development was observed from the onset of his acquisition of English as a second language (age 2 ; 10) till he reached the level of balanced Croatian-English bilingualism (age 3 ; 11). The evidence of first language attrition were the following: lexical retrieval problems, processing difficulties, transfer of L2 phonological features into L1, reduction of L1 morphological complexity. All the features appeared already within the first five months of bilingual development. The paper focuses on the dynamic nature of the observed bilingual development by analysing the mentioned features of first langauge attrition, their interaction with second language development, and the process of their recovery. The analysis is carried out within different theoretical frameworks: linguistic and psycholinguistic-sociolinguistic. On the basis of the research findings it is argued that both frameworks may play a role in the explanation of the L1 attrition (and L1 recovery) processes, although different frameworks seem to have different explanatory potential for different aspects of L1 attrition (and recovery). Furthermore, it is argued that the theoretical background within which the analysed data also fit well is the notion o multicompetence, as well as the Dynamic Model of Multilingualism.

first language attrition; early successive bilingualism

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